Heretics / Orthodoxy (3)…

The science of “celebrity”

I’ve been thouroghly enjoying my adventure through G. W. Chesterton’s Heretics and Orthodoxy.  I say “adventure” because being an early 20th century author he employs language and cultural references that are not always readily understandable, so some work is involved in grasping what he is saying.  I continue to find it amazing that despite the so-called death of the so-called moderns, and now even the possible death of post-modernity, that we are still dealing with the same root issues that Chesterton was dealing with 100 years ago.  I’m guessing that to a degree most of these issues have been around for most of human history in one form or another.

But here is the quote de jour from the chapter “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity” in “Heretics.”  This particular selection deals with the notion that a scientific civilization tends to destroy the power of the ordinary man and prop up the “experts” or celebrities as we might view it today.  I find this selection quite prophetic.

Science means specialism, and specialism means oligarchy.  if you once establish the habit of trusting particular men to produce particular results in physics or astonomy, you leave the door open for the equally natural demand that you should trust particular men to do particular things in government and the coercing of men.  If, you feel it reasonable that one beetle should be the only study of one man, and that one man the only student of that one beetle, it is surely a very harmless consequence to go on to say that politics should be the study of one man, and that one man the only student of politics.  As I have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better.  But if we look at the progress of our scientific civilization we see a gradual increase everywhere of the specialist over the popular function.  Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better.  If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

We must beware of leaving things to the “experts.”  This is a prime danger of political activism.  In many cases political activism, whatever the cause, props up certain individuals who people believe will solve the problem and therefore we believe that it is their responsability to solve the problem and our responsibility to vote, and get others to vote for them (I believe the current administration beautifully exemplifies this, though it wasn’t absent in the last one either).  As Christians we have been given great personal responsibility!  It is wonderfully true that in one Man, Christ, we have been saved, but we are further instructed to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” meaning that we don’t sit back and let the “experts” handle our Christian responsibilities…we join the chorus and sing with all our individual might!